[gto47]

It seems like they keep bumping up the base level quality for youtube videos and it has just reached a point where my 1.33ghz ibook w/ 1.5gig ram can no longer play youtube videos without skipping badly. It was on the edge for about a year, and this last bump in quality has pushed the playback into the realm of unwatchable.

The irony is that the millions of netbooks that are being sold have similar benchmarks and play the content just as poorly. I dont know if i should be blaming youtoube or hardware manufacturers here, but what gives?

[mduell]

The issue is the incredibly poor performance of flash on OS X. Even your deprecated iBook could easily play the video content a decent media player.

[Simon]

Flash performance is equally poor on Linux.

Bottom line, Flash sucks on anything but Windows.

[Cold Warrior]

what if you choose the youtube HD option? That uses the H264 codec.

[gto47]

My girlfriends 1.6Atom LenovoPad running xp can't play the content either. I expected it to be substantially better than the ibook with all the flash performance problems on ppc. But its equally bad. Hitting the hd button makes things much much worse.

HTML 5 here we come. Unfortunately I work in flash for a living.